INNOCENT ABROAD

A vivid insider’s account of the Clinton administration’s Middle East statecraft.

Where Patrick Tyler’s excellent A World of Trouble (2008) spreads over six decades, Indyk drills down, focusing on a single administration’s Middle East diplomacy. From his positions as National Security Council member and two-time ambassador to Israel, Indyk closely observed the personalities and myriad political considerations that drove Middle East policymaking from 1992 to 2000. His in-the-room recollections of major players like Syria’s Asad, Jordan’s King Hussein, Egypt’s Mubarak and PLO Chairman Arafat, as well as Israeli leaders Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon add color and dimension to his meticulous reconstruction of the intricacies of high-level diplomacy. Clinton set out to leave well enough alone in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to enforce a “dual containment” of Iraq and Iran and to broker an Arab-Israeli peace, first by achieving a breakthrough with Syria. Though he enjoyed some successes (an unexpected peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, for example) the strategy for the most part unraveled. Indyk hints at Clinton’s lack of unwavering principle and political discipline, but he attributes the diplomatic failure largely to the resistance of Arab leaders to change, Israeli political rivalries, Palestinian dysfunctionalism and periodic outbursts of violence and terror that sabotaged any chance for peace. Nevertheless, the author also squarely blames American ignorance, naiveté and idealism, examples of which abound here, all comically summarized by a botched instance of presidential gift-giving to Jordan’s king and queen. Sympathetic to the earnest efforts of his foreign-policy colleagues—Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Anthony Lake, Dennis Ross and Strobe Talbott—Indyk reserves his scorn for the succeeding Bush administration’s abandonment of the excruciatingly difficult peace process he so memorably describes.

An important cautionary tale—required reading for the next president.